Category Archives: Professional Historian

Articles, Heritage news, Professional Historian

How to write about industrial heritage, conservation, and glow worms, all at the same time

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Industrial heritage, Glow Worm Tunnel walking trail, Naomi Parry Duncan 2024.

Last year was very busy, as I was mostly writing my book, but I did do one exceptionally wonderful project, which was interpretive signage for the recently renovated Glow Worm Tunnel walking path. I got to work with my good friends, the designer Judith Martinez-Estrada and the intrepid audio-visual producer and all-round outdoors person Caro Ryan, and between us we created signs and audio-visual content for a fantastic new experience. We also got to spend time exploring an amazing place, that is seriously one of the most beautiful parts of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.

The Glow Worm Tunnel walking path actually follows the route of the Wolgan Valley Railway, a hugely ambitious but short-lived railway that cut through incredibly beautiful but forbidding country to try to access oil shale, for making kerosene. After the railway was abandoned and the lines ripped up for scrap, thousands of glow worms colonised the longest tunnel on the track. It’s peaceful and dark in there, with plenty of running water, and it’s one of the best places in Australia to see glow worms. Trying to balance information about industrial heritage and the technical specifications of shale railways with scientific information about these bizarre cannibalistic creatures required a fair bit of ingenuity. It was honestly one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever done.

You can find out about how to access the track through the NSW Department of Parks and Wildlife’s website here. Download the audio guide from the app before you go, because I wrote that too!

You can also read about my process of making the signs in Historia+, the newsletter of the Professional Historians’ Association of NSW/ACT.

Washout on Glow Worm Tunnel walking trail, Naomi Parry Duncan, 2024

Anzac, Good news, Professional Historian, Writing

Event: the Katoomba launch of New South Wales and the Great War

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Megalong Books invites history buffs and students and teachers to an afternoon at Katoomba Falls Kiosk with Katoomba local Dr Naomi Parry and Sydney University’s Professor Stephen Garton, two of the four authors of a New South Wales and the Great War, a new book that Governor David Hurley called “visually arresting and authoritative account of NSW during and after the Great War”.
When the Great War began in August 1914, the people of New South Wales took up the call to arms. NSW sent more people than any other state to serve overseas and many more worked and volunteered to support the war effort. But the economic, political and emotional strains of war, and the loss of so many young men, and some women, in the service of their country, fanned social and political divisions and wrought lasting changes to the society to which serving men and women would return.
New South Wales and the Great War tells this story. It is drawn from the rich visual and written records held by the Anzac Memorial, the State Library of NSW, NSW State Records, the NSW Department of Education and the University of Sydney, as well as collections from Bourke to Gilgandra and Newcastle to Lithgow.
It is the official publication of the NSW Centenary of Anzac Advisory Committee and over summer it was distributed, free of charge, to all public and Catholic schools in New South Wales and to most libraries.
This event is an opportunity to meet the authors and the publisher learn about the writing of this important publication.
Venue: Katoomba Falls Kiosk, Cliff Drive, Katoomba
Date: Sunday 30 April 2017
Time: 2-4pm
Entry by gold coin donation.
Megalong Books will be selling copies on the day.

Professional Historian, Writing

1967 in Tasmania

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Collins Street in Hobart. ABC/TAHO

I’ve just come back from Tasmania, my home country. Today is 50 years since the 1967 bushfires, which devastated southern Tasmania. More than 60 people died. The Huon and Channel were also devastated and the town of Snug ravaged, leaving many dead. The fires raged so hard in the foothills of Mt Wellington that authorities contemplated setting off a line of explosives across West Hobart to stop them penetrating into the CBD.

Big fires leave scars. I wrote this in 2015, in an essay I contributed to Dee Michell, JZ Wilson and Verity Archer’s Bread and Roses: Voices of Australian Academics from the Working Class:

We arrived in 1974, at a time when there was little reason to hope in the valley. At intervals in the green rolling hills you could see ash-coloured chimneys, twirled with sheets of whitened corrugated iron and bed springs, marking places where people had lived before the 1967 bushfires, but were too scared or dead to return and clean up. The deaths spooked me as a kid. Tales of people who had hidden in water tanks and boiled had a horrible relevance when you heard that the fires had touched the very corner of your new bedroom. It is only as an adult that I’ve come to appreciate the economic loss that went with those other, profound losses.

There’s a Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery exhibition on at the moment that talks about it, and some brilliant ABC Tasmania and LINC photo galleries that really show how awful it was. As climate change intensifies, we could all face this. I really hope we don’t.

Good news, Professional Historian

Dr Naomi Parry, MPHA

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I just got news that I’ve been accredited as a professional historian by the Professional Historians’ Association of NSW & ACT. This means I can add another set of letters after my name: MPHA.

It’s very exciting to be accepted as a peer by a bunch of historians I respect. On a more personal level, way back when I was a baby heritage practitioner, just after I arrived in Sydney, I worked with some fabulous professional historians. I used to wonder how they got their jobs and now I guess I know.

I feel both grown up and rejuvenated.